Tempest
by vacant houses
Summary: He is born amongst the dead and he knows that he has come back wrong. Very wrong. (And he would have given anything not to have been right) A series of Time War short stories. (Now AU as of the new mini-episode)
1. Chapter 1

Doctor Who? Not mine.

A/N: The Ninth Doctor has always been my favorite (And he was the one who brought me into Doctor Who. My mother grew up Doctor Who and felt it was appropriate to indoctrinate all her children in this tradition.). And while I'll cringe and sigh and wonder what the hell I liked so much about his episodes when I re-watch them five years down the track, his character is what drew me in and he keeps me fascinated in a way the other Doctor's simply don't.

And the Time War? That's a big blank slate for anyone to go play around with. Plus fancy titles such as Oncoming Storm and Lonely God? My headcanon went a little nuts with the ideas it stirred up. These will just be some short stories exploring what my mind dredged up.

I should note that all my canon knowledge of Doctor Who encompasses new Who and a lot of the Eighth Doctor novels, the last Seventh Doctor novels and nothing more. For all the other Doctors, it's all fanon for me, I'm afraid.

* * *

**Tempest**

He is born amongst the dead and he knows that he has come back wrong.

Very wrong.

Life comes rushing through his body as he draws his first breath for the ninth time. His eyes open to harsh red sunlight and devastation, he is lying upon on a pile of ruined corpses in the midst of a shattered city. His mission, his existence comes rushing back, the Time War, Daleks, Themos Five and the knowledge that they have lost this battle.

Themos Five has fallen.

He sits up for the first time –the ninth first time, really- and everything wobbles and shifts. He is wrong, some part of his mind whispers and he stares at his hands, covered in thick, dark orange Themosian blood. But then his identity reasserts itself over the wrongness, he is the Doctor, this is his ninth body and Themos Five is about to be erased from time and all existence. His new left hand automatically glides over to his new right wrist where the recall beacon should be to send him home.

There's nothing there.

It's gone, gone in the explosion that had killed him and the Themosian contingent that he'd been leading to death and war.

He feels the first trace of concern and worry in his new body. The Time Lords had already withdrawn from the planet; he knows this due to the subdued hum in the back of his mind. If there were any of his people closer, his own psychic awareness would be thrumming away at their presence. There is also a message that had been left for him in his unconscious mind and he'd gleaned its contents almost as soon as he awoke, a temporal withdrawal for the entire sector had been called. Themos Five was a focal point for many of its neighboring planets; too many timelines interweaved within in it that its loss would destabilize the entire region.

The Doctor cannot stay here; he carefully climbs his way down from the bloodied bodies, ignoring the empty gazes of the dead.

It is a pity to lose Themos Five for many reasons, many of them sentimental and irrelevant despite the fond memories he has of this world. The most practical is that the Themosians were a powerful race of beings and useful allies. Evolved from a feline-like species, they were quick and devastating on the battlefield, their sharp reflexes allowing them to avoid enemy fire. And they were deadly accurate in return, once the Time Lords had upgraded their weaponry to pierce Dalek armor, Themosian contingents had become the default choice for ground battles.

And this…this broken world that the Doctor stood on, a world of corpses and fractured timelines, was the Enemy's retaliation. Despite their best efforts at keeping it hidden, keeping it protected -safe- Themos Five had fallen.

Another casualty, another battlefield lost, unfortunate but not unexpected.

There would be more. There would always be more.

The Doctor stood still and surveyed the dying sky. If his battle armour was still intact, he'd be able to see up into the atmosphere and identify the location of Gallifreyan battleships still in orbit. But he has nothing on him, he is naked down to his skin. The time-bomb that had hit had been powerful enough to overcome the temporal buffers inlaid in his armour; it had been incinerated trying to absorb the shock. And even then, that had not been enough.

It was useless to ruminate on what had happened. He needed to leave as soon as possible. He took an unsteady step forward, he would need to find communication, secure communication, and request for a recall before the Daleks travelled back in time and destroyed Themos Five at its very beginning.

He takes another step and stumbles, his hands fly out to catch his fall.

And lightning flashes from his hands as he hits the ground.

His hearts stop. He stares at the hand in front of him -his hand, how can this be his hand?- his left hand. A hand that can shoot lightning. And its his. His hand. It's not regeneration energy leaking from his body; this is Time in its purest form.

And it's coming from him.

His brain pounds away inside his head in warning as something warm-bright inside him catches his attention. There's an enormous reservoir inside of him and it is full of Time, of Possibility, of Eternity, all for his using. He could do anything with this, anything that he wants and he _wants to_. He could reach inside of it and use it to move him from here to one of those ships waiting in orbit.

It would be easy.

Easier than breathing.

His vision wavers and something, that thing that whispered he was wrong, it screeches a blatant refusal and he curls up in agony. There's a hurricane of questions inside his mind but at the same time his brain is trying to block them. Just accept it, the bigger part of him says, gazing eagerly at that pool of Time. It's there, it's his and it'll keep him alive to fight another day.

The questions are silenced. Almost. Then one slips through and everything in his mind shatters.

_If it's been there all along, why have I never used it?_

He remembers and he _knows_.

He knows what he is, what's been done to him.

He is not the Doctor.

_Not the Doctor at all_. _But the Doctor did this to him, made him this way, because the Doctor couldn't-_

He laughs hysterically, disbelieving. The ground shakes. No- the planet _shakes_. It's a tremor through time, the death knell of Themos Five right as it is struck right in the moment of its birth.

The Not-Doctor straightens; his mind calm and accepting what is inevitable.

With a flicker, he is gone from Themos Five, a planet that never was and never will be.


	2. Chapter 2

**Tempest**

Breathe.

Just breathe.

He's less than five minutes old in this body, his eyes are shut tight and he is trying to stop everything, his mind, his sanity - _he is not the Doctor!_ - from falling apart.

His forehead and hands are pressed to the wall of the ship he'd transported to. His fingers are clenching into the sheer metal and gouging holes in it.

"General?" someone asks and he laughs without meaning to. The sound is harsh, flat –_wrong- _and he can almost feel them flinch back.

_Go on then, _he thinks, says directly to her brain, still pressed against the wall as his own mind swirls helplessly out of his control. _Retreat's been called, there's nothing here for us. Surely you don't need me to walk you through this._

"No sir," the soldier says, steadfast now that she has her commanding officer's attention. "New orders have come in for you. You need to report to the _Ascendant _to receive them."

Have they now, the Not-Doctor says to himself. No time for breaks in this war, this war for Time. His mind is nowhere near settled, it churns with restlessness and upheaval from the trauma of regeneration. It's tempting to stay here and let it fracture to pieces as it tried to reconcile what has been done to him.

He pushes himself of the wall and finally opens his eyes and looks at the soldier. She's a Clorbian, all yellow skin, short tusks and two-toed feet. She gazes at him calmly now, unbothered by his state of undress and the orange Themosian blood that coats him instead. Chances are she won't remember the people who it came from, a race that never existed, the moment she leaves the temporal buffers of the ship. The blood on his skin is also quite possibly the only thing left of the Themosian people, still existing because of his inherent nature as a Time Lord. He is shielded for the most part from the effects of ever shifting time-lines. He keeps catching souvenirs of non-existent civilisations in his wake, saved from annihilation just by being in contact with him at the very end.

"We'll get them next time," the Clorbian says to him quietly. Firmly. Like she believes it.

The Doctor would have given her a smile and assurances. Then asked her for her name so that when she fell, on a cold, empty planet somewhere, at least he'd remember her and this moment in time.

The Not-Doctor traces one finger in the drying blood and flicks it from his skin. It'll be nice to have a shower at some point, he thinks. He'll need new armour as well.

_Where's the store? _He asks the soldier by his side.

The Clorbian gives him directions and he saunters away, the encounter already forgotten. He knows that the end of her story is near and he sees no need to brighten the inevitable. She is merely one of countless others. She won't matter at all in the end.

His mind still spins; it's spinning out of control. New armour, a shower, new orders, he decides and with a temporary plan of action, his mind quietens down.

He'll fall apart later.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: Doctor Who does not belong to me.

A/N: For the record, I wrote this chapter way back on the 05/09/13 and this story has been living in my head for several years. Seeing the new mini-episode prompted me to post this chapter. I'm amused that this mad idea I had of a dissociative regeneration getting the Doctor through the Time War is now something that sorta looks like its canon. Just to clarify, this is Nine and not the War Doctor. (And since the Time War is finally going to be explained, I guess that makes this story AU)

x

**Tempest**

His new orders come from the very top. He thinks he should be flattered.

He isn't.

"Are you displeased with your new body, Doctor?" Romana asks afterwards, standing in the conference room of the _Ascendant._

She isn't there, not really. The President of Gallifrey is far too important, far too involved in the war effort to have the time to check up on one newly regenerated Time Lord. The Not-Doctor isn't exactly sure of how they've accomplished it, its classified information after all, but he is fairly certain he is speaking to a _Possible_ Romana, a Time Lady that could be or could have been.

Is he displeased with his body? He studies himself in the shiny metal interior of the _Ascendant_. His body is thin, wiry; it is not the body of a soldier at first glance. But the Not-Doctor knows to look deeper, knows that there is a well of energy and endless possibility that awaits his command. It's always been there but the _Doctor_ has never seen the need for it.

Never used it.

Never touched it.

But _he_ will. It's his life, the very source of Time for this regeneration and he is going to use it, drain it away and give himself an early death.

Because that's what this body is, this existence.

Disposable.

A may-fly existence for a Time Lord's life.

The Doctor's always been rough on his regenerations, he'd gone through them at a ridiculously fast pace. But he has never sought death; the short length of his lives had been accidental and the result of living in a dangerous universe, far away from Gallifrey's safe serenity.

The Not-Doctor's creation had been deliberate. Not the time of choosing but the nature of the regeneration. Had Romana had a hand in this? Had the Doctor chosen this? He wonders. It seems an unlikely act for the Doctor, to allow this. He would not allow another to do what he could not do himself.

Everything would have been so much easier if he'd never broken the programming.

_You are the Doctor_, his mind had said upon waking. _A Time Lord from the Planet Gallifrey. This is you. This is your life. You stole a TARDIS, escaped to Earth and have trampled all over Time and Space._

_This is you, the Doctor and there is a Time-War that needs you. This is your mission._

_And this? This is your Time. You can use it for anything. _

_Use it for the War._

A Time Lord instinctively refused to use their _time _-their life-force- for anything other than what it was. Because it could be exactly that, _anything._ It was Infinite Possibility and it could reshape the universe as the Time Lord saw fit. But it comes at a cost, the price is the Time Lord's very own lifeforce and Possibilities.

That the Not-Doctor's mind had wanted to use his Possibility immediately suggested that his natural instincts had been overcome. The Doctor had heard of this, whispers and rumours about dissociative regenerations for Time Lords unable to cope with battle and the realities of war. The regenerations were short-lived, immeasurably powerful and guiltless, able to commit atrocities all in the name of the mission without a flicker of regret.

Regeneration may change a Time Lord, it was a new existence that walked away in a new body always. But these ones broke the core components that made a Time Lord, that immeasurable thing that remained even after death and rebirth. Instead it allowed empty killing machines to take their place, capable of mindless slaughter.

And perhaps even more soul chilling was that the original Time Lord could be restored at the end of it. The regeneration was still gone, a number down in their mortal thirteen. But it allowed someone else to take their place and commit acts in their name, fully believing themselves to be real. And the original Time Lord wouldn't remember any of it; their memories would be dulled and twisted of this faux persona, to something acceptable within their moral code.

He leans up close and the metal warped his features as he studies his eyes. Were those the eyes of a Time Lord who could killed billions all in the name of war and not feel a thing?

The Not Doctor straightens and turned to face Possible-Impossible Romana. "Have a rank, me," he reminds her sharply, the first words out his new mouth bitter and cutting. He is a soldier now and whilst the Doctor may have indulged himself in friendship and other frivolities during these times, he will not.

It might be his imagination but Romana looks resigned and regretful. "My apologies, General," she says and fades away like the impossibility she is.

The General places both hands on the cool metal and rests his forehead against the wall. Anger builds in him, fury at the Doctor and what he has done. How dare he try to avoid this war, avoid making the decisions that would see Themos Five and countless more dead and razed from Time itself. He could not hide from this, the atrocities to come would be on them both, the General would not deny the Doctor his role in this.

When the times comes, the General decides, his thoughts dark and spiteful. When the time comes for the Doctor to return, he will not be spared a moment of this regeneration.

That will be the price to get through the Time War.


End file.
